I recently bought an ASUS EeePC 1000HE, and have been very pleased with it. I immediately installed Ubuntu 9.04, and was delighted to find all functionality working out-of-the-box.

However, the one thing that has puzzled me the last couple of weeks has been random websites loading in Firefox as I was scrolling web pages (with the two-finger multi-touch functionality), or sometimes even an error dialogue saying the URL was invalid and could not be loaded.

It turns out that this is because the touchpad sometimes interpreted my scrolling as a middle-mouse-button click – which (previously unknown to me) causes Firefox to load the text in the clipboard as a URL.

This behavior is easily disabled by going to about:config in the address bar, searching for middlemouse.contentLoadURL, and changing the value to false.

Hopefully this might help anyone experiencing the same issues as me. There is more info on the middlemouse.contentLoadURL property at MozillaZine.

I had previously been using the mplayer mozilla plugin, and although playback worked, it was quite choppy (it didn’t seem to buffer too well), and I could not pause/resume or seek.

My first thought was to look in the Medibuntu repositories, and sure enough, there was a realplayer package – unfortunately it seems that this did not include the mozilla plugin.

My next try was to look at the RealPlayer for linux website, but it only has a download for the 32-bit version. I did notice that there was a link to helix player for other platforms. Helix player is an open source media player on which RealPlayer is based. I tried helix player, but this can not play back proprietary codecs (and therefore not the real stream from the BBC website), however it did include a mozilla plugin!

I tried a combination of both – I installed RealPlayer from the Medibuntu repositories, and installed the mozilla plugin from the helix tarball to my home directory. And it works!

Load RealPlayer (Applications > Sound & Video > RealPlayer), and in Tools > Preferences, select the hardware tab, and set the audio driver to OSS. Press OK, and close RealPlayer.

Download and unpack (into a temporary location) the Helix Player for AMD64 – I grabbed the linux-2.6-glibc23-amd64 tar.

Copy the contents of the “mozilla” folder to ~/.mozilla/plugins (in your home directory – you may need to create the plugins folder).

Update: Looks as if I may have jumped the gun a bit – looking at the files installed by the medibuntu realplayer package, it does indeed look as if it comes with the mozilla plugin. I do not know why it wasn’t working for me (maybe it places it in the wrong location?) – but I am running fine with the above solution (even if it is a bit messy).

thummer is a website-snapshot and thumbnailing utility I am working on, built using django. Read my previous thummer blog post to find out more about the project.

Assumptions

In this article, I am assuming that we are installing thummer on an existing Ubuntu server (8.04 or later) with Apache already installed, and that you are comfortable with editing apt’s sources.list file.

Step 1: Install A “Fake” X-Server

If you do not have a desktop environment installed on your server (probably a good thing!), then you will need to install xvfb, which provides a virtual screen so that we can capture the rendered output of the website:

Xvfb provides an X server that can run on machines with no display hardware and no physical input devices. It emulates a dumb framebuffer using virtual memory.

Step 3: Install Django

For hardy only: The version of django hardy ships with is too old for thummer. Install Jaunty’s version of python-django from the updates repository by downloading the .deb file from Launchpad (remember to keep an eye out for future security updates):